5 Minutes with Dave Scott-Thomas

Fans of U.S. marathoning know the story: In 2000, when the U.S. only put one man and woman into the Olympic marathon, it sparked a distance revolution of sorts, with groups, individuals and, to some extent, shoe companies, trying to develop solutions to America’s lack of distance stars. Alberto Salazar created the Nike Oregon Project, Kevin and Keith Hanson founded the Hansons-Brooks Distance Project and Pete Palmer and Zika Janes started ZAP Fitness, among others. But while that year was a low point in American marathoning, it was also a low point for Canadian marathoning. They, too, only put one man into the Olympics, Bruce Deacon, who would finish 44th in 2:21:38.

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Since then, 12 years and two more Olympics have passed, but only now are the Canadians finally making their own resurgence. That’s what makes University of Guelph and Speed River TFC coach Dave Scott-Thomas so unique: while many have attempted, the only two runners under Athletics Canada’s rigorous Olympic team standard of 2:11:29 — Reid Coolsaet and Eric Gillis — are coached by Scott-Thomas. Unless three runners miraculously run faster than those two in the coming months, they’ll both be on the starting line on Aug. 12 in London. Coolsaet has run under the standard twice now, most recently in the Toronto Waterfront Marathon last October, where he set his PR of 2:10:54. Teammate Gillis qualified in the same race with a 2:11:27. However, Scott-Thomas doesn’t think it’s quite safe to call the current situation a revolution in Canadian distance running. (Another of Scott-Thomas’ runners, Taylor Milne, took second in the mile at the New Balance Indoor Grand Prix on Saturday in Boston with a 3:56.40 effort.)

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Running Times: Canada, compared to the U.S., has a more rigorous marathon standard in place, which is part of the reason of why Canadian men haven’t joined the field of an Olympic marathon since 2000. What is your thought of such a stringent standard?

Dave Scott-Thomas: The standard for us came through Athletics Canada, who looks at the numbers from IAAF and IOC. In the last decade or so, the notion overall has been of set the bar high, and people will rise to the occasion. You can debate the merits of that. My challenge is not having a bar set high for the world championships or Olympics, but we often set the same sort of standards for Commonwealth Games or Pan Am Games. Our process overall for Canada is we tend to have pretty lengthy, convoluted documents for qualifying [laughs] and you have to do a lot of reading to figure out exactly what’s going on.

But the standards are pretty high. And we knew that. So, whether you agree with them or not, we knew what they were a couple years ago for it; we knew in 2010 when Reid was lining up for Scotiabank (Toronto Waterfront Marathon) that the “A” standard was there (Coolsaet would break the standard for the first time, running 2:11:23), and we knew to get more than one marathoner to the Games, they all had to get “A” standards. So that’s just the way it is. So our focus has been since that time, since we first heard the numbers coming out in the late spring of 2010, that that’s what our training would be geared around.

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That said, you focus to be the best you can be. Our group philosophy hasn’t been to focus to run to a number; it’s to get out and to push your body to its maximum and see where that can take you. And the number that comes as a consequence of that is going to be the right number.

RT: You’re a coach that’s had success over a range of distances, from 1500m up, but does the marathon have a special place in your coaching philosophy?

DST: Yeah. Competency is appealing to me, so the distance doesn’t matter, and again, when I started coaching, I kept hearing this notion of, “Well, there’s people that are specialists over 800m or the marathon,” and I understand that, but I don’t think it has to be limiting. If you conceptually understand energy systems, why can’t you program middle distance and long distance at the same time? So I have affection for any event where I’m working with somebody who’s competent and passionate about it.

We knew for some time, years ago, that Eric and Reid were heading towards the marathon. Both of them had the headspace that they can think that long-term, and so we knew we wanted to develop some tools for them on the track first, and build their volume up to a point where we thought they could run effective marathons. So the goal has never been to just complete a marathon; it’s been to be able to run international class times at the distance.

So, I love the marathon. I love the type of workouts that we’ve been doing with it. We meet at this crossroads out in the country called Cooks and Carter, and I love pulling up there in my truck and seeing the guys shaking it out and getting ready to go, and then getting them out on these old dirt, rolly country roads. I still also love going to the track with Taylor Milne (3:36.00 1500m best) and Hilary Stellingwerff (4:05.69 1500m best) and having them do 1500m workouts. I don’t have one distance or event that I prefer over others. I just have athletes in the group that want to be good at what they’re doing, and that’s really my primary driver. RT: Coolsaet’s over in Kenya right now for training, and he must have your blessing to be over there. How do you guys plan for this in his build-up to London?

DST: I love it. He’s going to come back in the best shape of his life. It’s funny: I think we’re a pretty precise group, and we’re pretty methodical, and we try to temper that with the fact that also there needs to be a freedom in the sport, and a hunger and an ability to just riff off of where you’re at. So one of our conversations today was, “I’m working with all these guys, and they’re doing blood lactics at the track, and it’s really precise and measured, and we don’t do all that stuff.” I have my masters in physiology and our sport science is pretty sharp, so the balance is when you need to be precise and when you can free form it a little more. I don’t think those things are incompatible; in fact, I think if you really understand your body, then you don’t need all those precise tools.

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We needed him to be able to make decisions over there that just feel right. So, before he left, we made this five-week concept, and it was, “Keep the volume in this range, and guide your workouts in this wheelhouse.” Ideally, every week you’re going to get some tempo work in, and it’s going to be about this rate and here’s going to be the parameters, and about every two weeks you’re going to get onto this dirt track and here’s about the volume you should look at and the rate, but within those parameters, you should feel free to make decisions, because you’re going to be going over there and running into different groups and different people. So he needed to have that flexibility in his head, and we just keep communicating. So that means he gets up on a given day, and if he hears that these groups of Kenyan guys he’s training with are doing something a little different than what Reid and I talked about, he should feel comfortable to make the call. And he changes it. And I think that’s just more fun.

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So you know what I’m excited about? His volume is good. We didn’t feel this was the time and the place to jack really crazy new volume. I think he can get some returns from intentional volume increases over time, but going up to 7,000 feet and sort of trying to run that kind of program didn’t make much sense. So, it’s good volume. He’s been up to 220 kilometers a week (approx. 136 miles), roughly up there with some variance. I love the feedback that I’m getting from him because you can hear the excitement in his voice, and in his reports when we talk. When you’re younger, you think, “You know what I know how to do? I know how to work hard.” And I think sometimes as a senior athlete, especially in North America, we over-program, and we put people into these really narrow boxes, so I love the fact that he’s picking up the phone or he’s shooting me an email and saying, “I got up today and I ran into these guys, and they were doing tempos, so I just started following them, and when they started going uphill, I just went harder,” because there’s a real raw element to that type of work. You know, back to the primordial stuff, just run your butt off [laughs]. I’m fired up about seeing what he can do when we really get rolling this summer.

RT: What’s Eric Gillis up to lately, and does his training differ at all from Coolsaet’s?

DST: So Eric is in town now and running away. We’re focusing a bit more on volume and getting out. Fortunately, we’re getting a pretty mild winter. We’re still able to be on trails and country roads all the time. He’s married, and he’s got a young daughter, so for him, that’s a support system, and being here in town and being around his family is critical. It’s one of the reasons he’s not off in Kenya at altitude right now, because the return he gets from feeling good about that is frankly better we feel he’d get at altitude. He’s going to run the NYC Half in the spring (March 18) and bang out a couple of 10K road races. He and Reid are going to be sharing a house together up at Flagstaff (Arizona) for the month we’re there.

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RT: As you prepare for the Olympics, do you give them goals? Or what would their goal be for the Olympics?

DST: (Laughs) Soon as you put stuff out there publicly, you get kind of locked into that, and if you don’t do it, people think you’re cocky. So how about this: we’re not looking to be gentle with the marathon at the Olympics. What they ran in the fall in Toronto was just scratching the surface. I completely respect the Canadian national record (2:10:09, set by Jerome Drayton in 1975) and how long it’s been around, but the reality is, I believe that if it hadn’t been as windy as it was in Toronto, I think Reid would have knocked it off. I think he will physically and psychologically be ready to go significantly faster than he did in Toronto. I think both of them will. Our plan is not to just try to run around the “A” standard again; our goal is to go sub-2:10 for sure in both cases.

RT: With Gillis and Coolsaet, plus Dylan Wykes and Simon Bairu, why are there so many fast guys involved with the marathon right now?

DST: You’re right; it’s a cozy group. Everybody knows each other pretty well, and they’re all pulling for each other, frankly. But I don’t think it’s a wave yet. I think we’re at this moment in time, and I think if we don’t do some positive things in Canadian marathoning, it will just be a point in time.

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Eight years ago in Canada, someone ran a 2:16, you’d go, “Wow! We’ve got someone that ran a 2:16.” So I’m glad we’ve debunked that, and I’m glad that that’s gone, but I think if we’re not aware of it, and we’re not attracting new people in it and engaging them and doing the right things, I think it will be a moment in time. And I think 10 years from now, there’s a very real possibility that we could look back and say, “Man, remember around 2012 or so when there were all those hot marathoners? What happened?” We actually haven’t been filling in with depth. It’s not like we’re seeing a whole slew of 2:18-19 athletes—we’re seeing a few, but I don’t know if it’s enough to say it’s a full-on movement that’s going to sustain itself for a long time.

RT: What’s sown the seeds of what we’re seeing today?

DST: One reason is as simple as this—and I don’t think it’s just a Canadian thing; I think it’s a North American thing—I think we became afraid of volume, to be honest. And I think there was a push, from the mid-80s on, to really sit down and punch through to the middle of energy system work and do a very high percentage of anaerobic lactic work, what we would traditionally think of as track middle distance work. So I think we got away from people going out and putting one foot in ahead of the other and spending time on their feet for prolonged periods of time, and I think that killed us over 10,000m and over the marathon.

I don’t think we were the only group that started making that happen, but I think in Canada we were one of the key groups that started bringing that back. We were pretty vocal about getting out the door and running more—sensibly, though. If you look at where Dylan is at right now [Dylan Wykes, a 2:12 marathoner who will go for the Canadian standard at the Lake Biwa Marathon in Japan on March 4] and where Simon is at right now [Bairu, with the Jerry Schumacher Nike-backed Oregon TC, who missed the standard in Houston on Jan. 15], and if you look at the reports of Cam Levins down at Southern Utah [Levins was fourth at the 2011 NCAA Division I cross country championships] and the volume he was running in the fall [he was averaging 155 miles per week], we never used to hear anything like that. Ever. Right now, we’re hearing stuff that would have been frankly shocking a decade ago in Canada. A decade ago, you almost never heard of anyone running 100 miles in a week. That was crazy talk, right? What’s happened now is there’s a higher proportion of time spent doing aerobic work. The key, though, is that the messaging can’t be just, Well, just go and run a ton of volume and it will all work out, because if you’re not planning it sensibly, you’re going to break down. But don’t be afraid of getting out and running if you’re a runner.

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